Graham McGregor: A personal brand can make you well known and well paid

A personal brand is crucial to becoming well known and well paid. Photo / 123RF

I had an interesting chat recently with personal branding expert Lauren Clemett.

At 8 years old Lauren was told she had 'word blindness' and would never be able to read or write properly.

Yet she went on to become a five time best-selling author and Stevie Award Winning Neurobranding expert, using her dyslexia disability as her greatest asset - to understand how the brain sees brands.

For over 25 years Lauren worked in world leading advertising agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Ogilvy & Mather and Clemenger BBDO.

Today Lauren has her own personal branding consultancy, the Ultimate Business Propellor and has created the award winning Authority Rocket program which has helped hundreds of professional services providers around the World, to become well known, well paid and wanted.

In our chat I asked Lauren to share some of her thoughts on how to use personal branding to become well known, well paid and wanted.

The first thing that Lauren told me is that "You can't help every Mary in the dairy"

You want to decide the one thing you want to become well known for and the type of ideal clients that you want to work with.

Here's a good example:

Lauren worked with a business consultant called Dianne.

Dianne originally called herself Equilibrium Business Consultants. (So her business was about helping clients to find balance in their lives.)

Lauren helped Dianne to discover the one thing she wanted to become well known for. They found that from an early age Dianne was fascinated with money and making profits.

For instance Dianne did a milk run when she was very young. She hated doing the work of delivering milk but loved counting the money.

Lauren rebranded Dianne's business so it is now called 'Wildfire.' Dianne now works exclusively with wellness practitioners who want to be leaders in their field. (Dianne goes through each wellness business like a wild fire and makes it highly profitable.)

Lauren told me that the biggest thing holding people back from building a great personal brand is waiting till things are perfect.

Her big message to clients it that it doesn't have to be perfect for you to get started.
In fact, trying to make it perfect is usually a big mistake.

Example:

Lauren met someone who spent six months creating the perfect lead magnet for their business. But when they launched their lead magnet they found it didn't work. So they had wasted six months.

Contrast that with a client that Lauren worked with who was a yoga teacher.

She came up with an idea called 'Flexible Families' where she would get people together for 21 days of yoga before breakfast. Now the 21 days yoga programme had not been created yet.

Lauren encouraged her client to post invites about her yoga programme on Social Media. Her client was shocked when around 200 people then sent her a message saying they were keen to give her 'flexible families' programme a go and when did it start?

Lauren shared a great phrase with me about this concept of taking action.

"It doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be done."

Here are some more thoughts from Lauren on personal branding.

Personal Branding is the process of creating a specific image of yourself in the mind of your ideal client, so they can get to know, like and trust you, before they buy from you.
Your personal brand makes you stand out from a crowd of competitors.

Selling services is like selling thin air, you need to create confidence that you can deliver on what you promise, in order for you to become the trusted expert.

Personal branding goes far deeper than just your company logo and brand name.

The human brain makes decisions based on memory and emotion and a confused mind will never buy.

Packaging together all of your natural skills and talents, with a consistent message, familiar brand voice and instantly recognised style, makes it so much easier to promote your services in a way that makes sense to your target audience.
It's all about reputation, recognition and respect.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon says your personal brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

And it can rocket launch your business, because the best form of marketing is not what you say about yourself. It's what other people say about you.
What do you want to be recognised for being the best at?

"All of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You." - Tom Peters

Action Exercise:
I recommend your visit Laurens website for further details on how to create a memorable personal brand that will allow you to become well known, well paid and wanted.

Graham McGregor is a Marketing Strategist and helps business coaches attract perfect coaching clients from around the world. You can download his marketing guide ‘You Deserve Perfect Coaching Clients’ at no charge from www.PerfectCoachingClients.com